


I went through this tutorial to about setting SSH key on Windows for Digital Ocean when I created the first SSH key: I didn't install any of the "offers" that popped up during installation. PuTTY seems to want you to install lots of extra stuff when you run the installer. I already have PuTTY installed on my Windows 10 machines at home and at work. Since I'm working on Windows, using PuTTYgen (a program that comes with PuTTY that generates SSH keys) seems like the easiest solution. SSH keys are needed to use PuTTY (regular PuTTY not PuTTYgen) to log into the server. So to make sure that doesn't happen again, I am going to generate the SSH keys first and set up the server second. I'm pretty sure that pasting a public SSH key into is not the best way to initially set up a server. I ended up copying the public key into, logging onto the server with the Digital Ocean console and using wget to bring a textfile of the SSH key from onto the server and then mv to copy the key name into the right location. It was a BIG PAIN adding SSH keys after the server started for the first time. But I goofed up somehow and the server started without any SSH keys. I tried to create and save the keys to the Digital Ocean dashboard so the SSH keys would be on the server when it first started. When I set up the server on Digital Ocean the first time, one of the initial server setup steps was to add SSH keys so the server has them when it initialized. Why SSH keys, PuTTYgen and why do this first?

